Has anyone ever worked with multi language sites? is it better to set up two separate domains? AAnd is there anything to watch out for with the whole duplicate content issue?

The preference would be to use country specific TLDs whenever possible, and there is no duplicate content issue between different languages.

This from an answer by Matt Cutts of G to a similar question....

Have a look at Internet Marketing | Website Promotion *|*logic+intuition

Thomas is an SEO and his site is dual-language. If you fly him an email he might be able to give you some pointers. The most difficult bit is when using conditional redirects - most SE spiders come from US IP addresses. I know he has some problems with getting the French version to show in the SERPs.

Only things I would add to glengara is to set the language attribute in both the server and page headers. As he said, use ccTLDs if at all possible.

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Hey Richard, Sinead and Glengara,

Thanks for the mention Richard - caught it in my referrers! :-)

We have a french and an english version of our site on one domain. I made this decision because I felt it would be better to have all link authority coming into one domain. This should give the site more authority overall.

The next decision is tricky then - how to optimise for regional search (google.ie, google.fr etc...) The three main variables to play with are:

1) In what country the site is hosted (in our case france),
2) The top level domain (in our case .com leaves it open, .fr or .ie would be less so)
3) The country of origin for the links to the site.

Our initial focus was on the French market so we decided to host it in france (which has been an absolute nightmare...) We then decided we wanted an international tld (.com) because we weren't aiming at one single market. Links so far have mostly been from french sites.

So far looking at our stats, most search traffic coming to the french site is from google.fr and google.ca. And most traffic coming to the english site is from english language google or other international versions. So that's working well.

Just really starting to work promoting the english side of the site. So we'll see how that goes with a french host.

On multi-lingual pages, Richard you've already reported back from SES that it's not a good idea having more than one language on a page. I certainly found it resulted in less search referrals.

There's a number of links related to regional SEO on

logicintuition.com's bookmarks tagged with "regional" on del.icio.us

I think overall there's quite a lot involved in making the best decision. Hopefully this will help...

Saying that I have seen sub domains work well for multiple languages as well.
Plua lot of large companies use techniques like that.

It can work extremely well if you have a mature root domain to work off.

When we talk about Multilingual SEO sites,we need to remember that there are certain things that need more attention and concentration.The content we are going to create is the main thing.The focus must be to provide quality content to the users and not depend on glossy stuff.Using correct language and understanding the culture is the most important thing .


New Frontier Multilingual Marketing

I have still not seen any proof that setting the target country in webmaster tools works but one thing that is interesting is that it's not possible to set up sub-folders as "sites" in the webmaster consol and you can there for set sub folders to be targeted at certain countries.

I have done a few tests and my results so far show no improvement in google.country after setting targettting that folder to a certain country.

I'm not sure if there's a lead time or they stiiiiillll haven't fixed it yet, which would be really annoying since they failed to mention that when promoting the above functionality...

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Having a country Specific domains and links from the relative niche's would help.